Computational models increasingly serve as the primary scientific artefacts in climate and earth-system research, yet the general-purpose languages used to build them often fail to express key domain semantics. We argue that this limits scientists’ ability to represent and verify domain-specific concepts and invariants even as the community pushes toward more open, modular, and interoperable modeling ecosystems. We therefore advocate programming-language designs for computational science that make such domain meaning explicit and compositional, for example through intersection types or graded type systems.

Prof. Dominic Orchard is a Research Professor at the University of Cambridge where he Co-directs the Institute of Computing for Climate Science. He is also an academic at the School of Computing, University of Kent in the Programming Languages and Systems group. His research interests are programming language design and semantics, mathematically structured programming, effect and coeffect systems, embedded domain-specific languages (esp. for parallelisation), and applying programming language research to computational science.